SPEAKER_03: Look at John Quincy Adams here. Yeah. Hey, hey Quincy. How you doing?
SPEAKER_03: That hair. Look at that hair. John Quincy Adams needed a wig to achieve this look. He did. He did.
SPEAKER_01: I did it all natural. I mean, it's a lot. It's a look. You're like some movie star from the 1970s
SPEAKER_03: who's still working. Do me a favor, pull up a picture of Graydon Carter for a second and then put that side by side with Sax. Let's see. Just zoom in on that. Sax, this is where you're headed, by the way. You're headed to crazy town. This is where you're headed. You can just
SPEAKER_03: poof it out on the sides and you get a little woof swoop on the top. This is where you're headed. Eccentric Sax. Pull up a picture of Steve Bannon's hair. He's a wise statesman. I think this is what happens when you get too close to power. You get more eccentric with your hair. So like too much power equals crazy hair. Now look, this is my theory. Graydon Carter, too much power, Vanity Fair. He went hair crazy. Now you look at Bannon. You get me a Bannon photo here. You start to see they go longer. They go wafty. They just, they get volume and they're just like, fuck it. I'm just, I'm not going to cut it. I'm going to let it go wild. And of course the, the old, I mean, he's the penultimate, but you look at Trump's hair. This is where it gets truly crazy. This is where you're headed. Sax. You keep getting this close to power. This is where your hair is. Glad this podcast never broke up. Cause where would we get this amazing insight from J Cal
SPEAKER_02: if not for keeping this all together, this makes it all worth it. It's very true. It is true. You
SPEAKER_03: get like eccentric and you get crazy hair. This is men get too close to power and the hair gets wild unchecked power, unchecked hair. We had a good meeting last night. We had an all in summit meeting. I said, freeburg, give me a call. Let's catch up on this stuff. He's like, oh, I'm in the bath right now with my candles. And I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. That's cool. He's like, no, no. And he presses the video button and then I'm exposed. I kid you not to the most bubbles I've ever seen in a bubble bath. I like bubbles and he is peeking his head out from over the bubbles. And he's like, look, exactly. And then he flips the camera around and I got his toes pointing out and I kid you not. There's six candles around the bathtub. I'm like, this is like the prince of panic attacks. He had to come down for his phone call with me. So now when he has a phone call with me, it's so intense and everything's getting so intense with the summit that he has to do self care. Yeah. I have to be emotionally, emotionally ready. He's self caring.
SPEAKER_02: Your wife wasn't anywhere to be found in the bathtub with the candles. I take a bath every
SPEAKER_01: night. Who are you? A romancing yourself or what? I think he was romantic. This spreadsheet with the
SPEAKER_03: profit lie of all in summit. I have about 18 minutes of self care every day. 18 seconds.
SPEAKER_03: All right, let's get the show started in three, two.
SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, welcome to episode 130 maybe of the all in podcast. We're still here cooking with oil with me of course, the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, Prince of panic attacks, Sultan of Science, the queen of kidwah, David Friedberg, and the power broker himself, the Emperor, David Sachs, the Emperor of his new republic. Anybody have any interest? Anything going on interesting this week? Any interesting moments for people on the national stage? No? Okay, let's get right to the docket. First around the docket, Ron DeSantis, Governor Ron DeSantis announced his bid on the internet on something called Twitter Spaces. And it looks like almost 10 million viewers have seen it so far across all the different spaces. And Donald Trump wasn't too pleased. He said, Rob, my big red button is bigger, better, stronger. And it's working truth because when Elon fired up the Twitter Spaces, he went to 650,000 viewers in under five minutes and then blew up everybody's phones. My phone was melting. I could have cooked an egg on the back of it. The Twitter app crashed so many times. But then Sachs with his meager following of a half million people or something, then restarted the stream. And so 15 minutes of technical snafus relieved and then there was a announcement. And I'll let you take it from there. Sachs, you're gonna take you behind the scenes. Take us behind the scenes. Take us behind the scenes. How
SPEAKER_03: did it come together? Sachs? Oh, yeah, even better. Yeah, the way it came together is I
SPEAKER_01: think the DeSantis team were interested in potentially, you know, doing something different for their announcement. He also did an appearance on Fox News afterwards. And I think he did a town hall. But I think they saw an opportunity to break new ground here in terms of presidential announcements by doing it on Twitter Spaces. And so the DeSantis campaign connected with Twitter. And Elon and I agreed to kind of co-host the space with him. And he did his announcement. Now, you're right, we had about 15 minutes of technical difficulties because the interest was so intense. At the time the room crashed, it had over 700,000 people in it. And there were 700,000 people in it. And there were a crash that so many people are trying to get in it. I think there was well over a million people trying to get in it. So you normally don't have this kind of interest. I think this is by far the biggest Twitter Space. The engineers there told me that the previous order of magnitude was more like 100,000, not a million. And then you combine that with the fact that Elon's account has over 100 million followers. And that basically led to a new level of scale. And you guys understand that when you get to a new level of scale as a platform, there's always going to be some challenges. So in any event, the engineers were there trying to figure out how do we solve this. And we realized the simplest thing to do would be to restart the room on my account instead of Elon's. And then Elon joins the coast and we brought DeSantis in and it all worked perfectly at that point. The audio was crisp. We had over 300,000 people in the room. There was also another room that had been set up by Mario Nawal, who's like a big Twitter Spaces host. And he had hundreds of thousands of people in there. And then he had live commentary from people he invited. And so this ability to fork Twitter Spaces into many different rooms and each room gets to decide who they want to be their hosts and their speakers allows you to do live commentary and in a way that you can never have done before. So it was really innovative, I think. Super innovative. And for people who don't know, Twitter Spaces was really a rush job
SPEAKER_03: at Twitter. They did that in reaction to Clubhouse. It's still basically a beta product that predates Elon being there. And it doesn't have yet the infrastructure or scale of the code base, I don't think, like YouTube and Twitch do, which have been working on this problem for, I don't know, 15 years. Maybe the live products. I have two observations. Yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_04: The first is I thought DeSantis did a really good job just rolling with the punches. Okay. Because I think whether he wins, you're not going to look back on this moment as the defining moment of the campaign, nor whether he loses. Will you say that this was where it was it all the beginning of the end? Instead, what this was, was a really seminal moment, I think, in further divorcing ourselves away from the mainstream media. And you know that it was that important because Biden tried to troll the whole thing. Nick, you can show this link. This link works. And I actually think this is a really terrible idea by the Biden team because never responds. This basically acknowledges how important the moment was. And the fact that even the President of the United States was grinding the link and couldn't get in because there was so much interest is really important. And I think what it speaks to is the fact that we are now showing credibly that you don't need to listen to four channels to shape your consciousness. And you can just go straight to the source. And what Sacks said is right. If you now have a moderated forum that then gets put out to 50 or 60 different Twitter spaces all at the same time, all at the same time, framing and reframing, it gives people a chance to come to their own conclusion in a totally unique way. So I think it was really, really an important moment for citizen journalism, and podcasting, and audio formats, and all of the things that I think we've been a small part of. But I think that it's really must have tilted the mainstream media and then it tilted the establishment. And you can see that in Biden's tweet. Yeah, going direct. Yeah. So that was the first thing. Second thing, I think DeSantis did a really decent job in rolling with the whole thing and being super cool and just being committed to the process. And I think that says a lot about him as well, which was, again, it's a question mark. And I've said this before, the big money guys got close and then took a step back. So this could be a very good moment for them
SPEAKER_04: to reevaluate because I thought he did a very good job. So I agree. So I was there, I was live, I was seeing what was happening behind the scenes.
SPEAKER_01: When DeSantis came on after we had 15 minutes of technical difficulties, there wasn't a hint of anger, there wasn't a trace of irritation, there wasn't any freaking out that we were potentially ruining his presidential announcement. The guy was completely calm. And more than that, he was in good spirits. I mean, if you listen to the recording, he's happy. His tone was good. His tone was great. His tone was really good. I mean, and then of course, it was very substantive. He spoke in a very articulate way about all the issues. When Congressman Thomas Massie came on to make a comment or question, he was telling a kind of amusing anecdote about when they were in Congress together. And Massie was one of the only members of Congress who had a Tesla, but he comes from Kentucky. So I think his license plate said Kentucky coal on it, KY coal. So anyway, you know, the guy was in good spirits. And so I think it does say a lot about what he would be like as a president, cool under fire, doesn't get thrown off his game. You know, again, not an angry guy, you know, which I think will be a real contrast with, let's say some of the other people in the race. You know, Trump was sort of angrily truthing during the whole thing, you know, so I think it was a pretty strong contrast. Truth in the act of posting to Truth Social.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. So the contrast between the personalities could not have been stronger. Now,
SPEAKER_01: to the other point, the chamath about the traditional media, you're right about what they were saying. If you look at that, the headlines this morning from traditional media outlets that really started within minutes of the technical difficulties, The New York Times called the announcement a fiasco. NBC News called it a meltdown. Politico called it horrendous. And you know why? I mean, if you You know what I call that? Winning. I mean, if they're losing their cool, that's clearly
SPEAKER_03: they feel threatened by the fact that a major presidential candidate chose to go direct. The Wall Street Journal headline is DeSantis looks to rebound after botched Twitter announcement.
SPEAKER_04: But again, what they fail to acknowledge is, and I'm not a DeSantis supporter per se, I'm open minded to him, but I haven't decided one way or the other. But this is a guy that managed to get millions of people in a nanosecond to be activated to hear what he had to say. That is different than basically giving talking points and having surrogates blather through Fox or CNBC or CNN to hundreds of 1000s of people. This is a really important moment, I think what happened. Okay, we got all the positive
SPEAKER_03: just to finish that point. So if this was a political rally, a traditional political rally
SPEAKER_01: that started 20 minutes late, would anybody have said that was a disaster? That happens all the time. No, it was the crashing that made people be like, Oh, my phone crashed, you know,
SPEAKER_03: I was using the app. I got crashed out of the app. But I had my phone did not crash. So
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, that's what I'm saying. The app crashed a couple of times because
SPEAKER_03: the app, your phone did not crash. Yeah. But any event, look, this was at the end of the day,
SPEAKER_01: this was a an event that started 20 minutes late. Once we started on my Twitter account in my Twitter space, it worked perfectly. There was no problem. And that's the recording that you can go on Twitter now and listen to. We had about 300,000 people contemporaneously in my Twitter space, I think Mario had a couple hundred thousand. But if you look at the numbers today, there's already 10 million views for this thing.
SPEAKER_03: Three to 10 million on the replay. And that's what you have to look at replay because the world has moved to asynchronous like this was three o'clock in the afternoon in Silicon Valley and six o'clock when was the afternoon in the afternoon. So you have a hysterical overreaction by the traditional
SPEAKER_01: media. They simply don't like a that Elon is just remediating them by letting the politicians go direct and then be he's restored the platform being a free speech platform. So they jumped on this the first second they could try and portray as a disaster. But you know, there was an article in Politico this this morning, and they were asking voters in Iowa what they think about it, and they're like, what, you know, it's not yet. It's an elite thing. That's not Yeah, it's not even
SPEAKER_03: on the radar. Freeburg. We heard all the positive here. Any constructive feedback on it or thoughts on it generally? No, look, I mean, I would love to see all the political candidates engage in
SPEAKER_02: long form discussion like this. So that an audience can really get a sense of who they are and what they think in a direct way and an uninterrupted way. And in a deeper way, sort of like the conversation we all had with RFK last week, and Saks did with DeSantis yesterday. And I would love for the voters to engage in that content to better understand the candidates rather than tee off of short talking points and short ads. I think one of the saddest commentaries on modern democracy is that you can spend $1 to buy a vote, that all of these campaigns functionally try and raise capital to go and do advertising, and that the advertising creates these little 30 second sound bites that actually change people's opinions. And it's a really sad it will it they did otherwise they wouldn't spend the money. And I think it's a really sad state of affairs that we spend money to change people's opinions by shortening everything to a soundbite. Instead of doing what maybe would have happened a long time ago, you know, we often talk about the town square, if you lived in a village with 60 people and someone was going to run for the mayor of that village, you'd all go to the town square, you'd hear that person have a debate, have a discussion, you talk with them. And that dialogue would inform your decision about who you're going to vote for. But you know, with 300 million people in this country, and you know, short attention spans and jumping around from one thing to another, there aren't a lot of great forums for any of us to really engage with candidates, particularly on the national level, and make a better informed decision hearing from that person directly. Instead, everything is about driving narrative and chopping things up and getting the soundbite and driving the emotional reaction. And I think one of the greatest things that's happening right now, that, you know, could be a great benefit for this modern democracy is the sort of stuff that we've been doing on our podcast and RFK coming on board, like last week, and what Saks did with Twitter. And I really hope that more politicians do that and that more people engage and consume that sort of content to make their decision and ignore the idiotic soundbites and the stupid 30 second ads and the nonsense that, you know, third parties use to try and drive narrative. So yeah, look, I mean, I think that's generally the positive trend that that I took away from it. Jake, what do you think? I have some notes for
SPEAKER_03: Saks, I'm always, you know, careful not to be too critical, you know, in the moment, because I don't people will weaponize them and say, Oh, Jason said this, because you know, it's Elon, and he's team Elon, or he's friends with Saks. But I think everything said so far, this tweak the media, a great start. The thing that I think was there were probably one or two misses here that I think you can build on Saks since you were very involved in the campaign with DeSantis. I think it wasn't the free for all that Elon had said it would have been right. So he pitched it as like, hey, this is going to be uncensored. And everybody's going to get to ask hard questions. And that didn't happen. And, you know, I think that is in stark contrast to what Trump did, because I was doing the media analysis of this. And so I think the follow up needs to be where he actually takes questions not from fans, not from people who are already voting for him. But really, you know, a little bit more of the cantankerous people, the people who maybe are voting for Trump, the people who are maybe in the Biden camp. And that's what was the masterstroke of Trump's CNN town hall. He went into the, you know, the lion's den or what most people perceive was going to be the lion's den. And he took on all comers. He fought hard. And that one was, I think, a bigger win. I don't think DeSantis... But that was not a presidential announcement. So just to be clear,
SPEAKER_01: this was a launch event declaring that he's running. So in that context... Yeah. So you
SPEAKER_01: want to compare it to what these things usually are, which is a guy standing at a podium. Yes. In front of his supporters. Compared to that, this was much more interesting, dynamic, and engaging. I agree with you that at some point, he's going to step into the lion's den, do a town hall on a place like CNN. And I think he probably will. In fact, I think he did. Yeah, I think he did a town hall. Or here. I think he actually did a town hall in Florida later that night. So yeah, I agree with you. It just wasn't that kind of event. Now, to the point about involving more people, you know, one of the things I learned hosting this thing is there were literally 1000s of people raising their hands. Yes, you can't sort through them. I was
SPEAKER_03: scrolling through this in real time in the app. I wanted to call them more people. But it was just,
SPEAKER_01: there was no way to do it. This is something at scale they need to add to the interface,
SPEAKER_03: which is maybe pre populating a list, sorting it by the number of followers, whatever. And this is my second point about this. So I agree with you. As an announcement, this was Lightspeed Ahead as like a full court, you know, like sharp elbow thing, it didn't hit that note, but it can. And that's what I think the follow up, you know, having if DeSantis wants to come here and have like a two hour discussion, we kind of get into it a little more, that would be, I think, really good for him. Because I think he's got the potential to win over moderates. And I don't think this one over moderates didn't win over anybody who was in, you know, the left or, you know, moderate left. And that was one of the things I noticed is my second point about it is what a great group of listeners, if you look at who showed up to listen, Bill Ackman, Michael Dell, because you know, it's you only see you know, you're sourced by your followers. So
SPEAKER_04: but I think it's sorted by the number of followers they have
SPEAKER_03: it sort by your followers who then have the most followers. So you're gonna see it's a bit of a
SPEAKER_04: echo chamber that way. Okay, feature.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, sure. But there were still very prominent people in the room because prominent people follow you. Okay, but they weren't coming to follow me, they were coming to listen to this. My point is still the same. Michael Dell, Bill Ackman were coming. So but that's why you saw them because they're your followers. We all understand that. They still showed up for this in the middle of the day. I think that is really interesting. And that Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's yeah, that's all my point is, it's really interesting that powerful people showed up for it full stop. Sacks, I have a question for you. Sorry, Jason, whenever you're done. Oh, yeah. And then I just had a couple of other ones. Elon was a bit underutilized in this format. And that's, you know, a challenge when you have Elon in the room, because people want to ask Elon questions. So this is something I think he's gonna have to, you know, contend with people wanted to hear Elon ask questions, then the people who are were asking the questions wanted to ask you on questions. So you do get like a little bit of how to utilize Elon in this format. I heard a
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_03: lot of fact channel from important people like I wanted to Elon ask a question, or maybe the two of them get into it. So for a follow up one, getting some people, you know, who maybe didn't maybe don't traditionally get to ask questions, because let's face it in traditional media, the only people get to ask questions are these anchors on news channels. I want to hear Michael Dowler Bill Ackman ask a question. That's the opportunity in Twitter spaces, maybe letting Elon ask a tough question, then a follow up or you know, like we did here with RFK, I would have been totally open to that. I just couldn't manage it. There was just so many people
SPEAKER_01: in the room. I didn't see Ackman actually, I mean, I totally believe he was there. But I didn't see only criticism people had of us access, you're a major donor, and you stack the deck was the most
SPEAKER_03: cynical version of it with like, five people who were just super effusive, but this is his launch party. So I think in that context, I would have called on Bill Ackman if I known he wanted to
SPEAKER_01: speak, but I can see whether he raised his hand or not. No, I didn't see him in the room. So what am I supposed to call on Bill Ackman? And he's like, guys, I don't want to talk. I don't want to put him in that spot. Can we get him on this pod so we can grill him about abortion and fiscal
SPEAKER_02: policy? Who Bill Ackman? I don't know. Look, I don't speak for the campaign, but I can put in
SPEAKER_01: the request. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you put 150 dimes and get him on hold on. Can you can you tell
SPEAKER_04: us the actual tick tock of how this whole thing came to be the campaign within the last week or
SPEAKER_01: two had the idea of should we explore doing it on Twitter spaces? And I think they were open to doing it. And
SPEAKER_03: sex didn't know about it. When I put it in our group chat. Sax was like he is. Yeah, you found out about it. I was being facetious. I was joking. I thought you didn't go no, sometimes Elon will just tweet something without telling anybody I just go to I mean, I help. Look, the DeSantis
SPEAKER_01: people reached out to Elon and Twitter. They also reached out to me about it. And we discussed it. And they were excited breaking the ground to something different. And I think they deserve credit for that. Can I ask a follow up question? Just on the DeSantis thing himself? Because you've
SPEAKER_04: seen him up close? Do you know why Schwartzman Griffin, Peter Fry stepped in took a half step back? And do you know what it's going to take for them to just lean in and just make this effect a complete so that he's really well financed to beat Trump? I don't know what their issues are. But I
SPEAKER_01: did see I don't know this. What's the name? Peter Fry or whatever? Yeah, yeah, I don't I don't know him. But I did see a press article and he was referencing book bannings. So that to me just showed that he was buying into some, you know, crazy left wing narrative. That was the best part
SPEAKER_03: of and I asked I asked this answer about that. So by the way, for people who say that was the one
SPEAKER_03: thing that was new news for a lot of people was the book banning. Can you explain the issue and the spin and the clarification on book banning in Florida? It's very simple. They haven't banned any
SPEAKER_01: books in Florida. But the question is what books are taught in the curriculum, and what's in the school library. And some of these books were positively pornographic. I mean, they had so on DeSantis at an event where somebody was actually reading what was in these books. And the mere reading of what was in the books actually got labeled on social media by the algorithms. So there was a lot of stuff that's just not appropriate for kids. No one is restricting your ability to buy or read whatever books you want in the state of Florida. It's ridiculous. There's a legitimate question about what's in the curriculum. By the way, I remember when we had debates on campus, about this is back a long time ago, like the late 80s, early 90s, when they were throwing dead white males out of the curriculum, you know, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, people like that. The people on the right, who were opposing that never made the argument that this was censorship. Everybody understands that when you're dealing with a curriculum, you have to make choices, you can't teach everything. So the question is, what are you going to limit it to? And I think that when people actually dug into some of these books, they realized that they're not appropriate. So in any event, his answer was along those lines that, you know, you should go listen to it for yourself. But I think that he did address that issue. I think he's kind of exposed it as a, you know, left wing media narrative. And I think he deconstructed that. And I think that was helpful because I think there are a lot of centrists, who all they've heard about DeSantis is that he's banning books or, you know, or the Disney issue, which we also asked him about. And we covered that, I think. So yeah, the Yeah, we talked about some of these controversies.
SPEAKER_03: The issue here, just to summarize, it is the left is framing the banning, quote, unquote, but just the not inclusion of certain books, which are graphic that have sex in them from certain age groups in schools as part of a curriculum. So they're saying these books are banned in Florida, the more accurate way to say it is, these books are not being used in curriculum. You know, for these age groups, parents, if they want to buy them, can buy them, and then can read them. So this is where this conversation is kind of breaking down. And I think is a complete waste of time. All parents want control over at what age or what stuff their kids are exposed to. And so there is a thoughtful discussion to be had there. And maybe the discussion is, this is something parents should decide, right? Yeah, of course, but it's not even a conversation. It's a hoax. It's a
SPEAKER_01: fake media narrative they're trying to pin on him. And DeSantis has been the subject and victim of these types of fake media narratives, which are deliberate. The media is not trying to have a conversation. They're trying to disqualify the guy. And they did this, this goes all the way back to COVID when he opposed lockdowns and kept schools open, and they called him Death Santas. So the media has had it in it for this guy since the beginning, because he refuses to go along with their narratives on things. This is the same reason they hate Elon, is Elon is defying their narrative control. So you put these two guys together, okay, hold on, even before the technical difficulties, let's be clear, the media's heads were exploding, that DeSantis and Elon were going to be in the room together. Look at the Vanity Fair article. The headline was DeSantis announcing with Elon because David Duke wasn't available. Okay, the Atlantic was saying that this whole Twitter space was a hate group. I mean, literally. So these people were losing their minds before we even got into the technical difficulties. And then they pounced on that, that there was a 20-minute delay. They pounced on that as some sort of fiasco, which it wasn't. Will DeSantis cut spending and cut our taxes?
SPEAKER_04: We cut spending.
SPEAKER_01: We didn't get into that. So have you ever had a conversation with him about balancing the budget and federal debt?
SPEAKER_02: Do you know his position on cutting long-term capital gains and taxes?
SPEAKER_04: I don't know his position on that. I can't speak to it. Let me give you the elevator pitch. I mean,
SPEAKER_01: the nutshell for DeSantis is he calls it the Florida blueprint. He's saying, look at what we've done in Florida, look at what we achieved at Florida, let's take Florida nationwide. Florida has had a great economy, Florida has had a balanced budget. But does that mean zero taxes? Zero taxes. No, because that's state taxes.
SPEAKER_04: If you have zero taxes, you have my vote.
SPEAKER_02: They ran a budget. The dictator has spoken. If people want to look up this issue, there's a book called Gender Queer,
SPEAKER_03: and there's a story about it in the New York Times. And it's, you know, it's a graphic novel about coming of age for a non-binary person, which is fine. Great. But it's very graphic. It's a graphic graphic novel. It has explicit scenes. And these kind of books, most parents would say, I would like to wait. I want a graphic novel on cutting my taxes to zero.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, there you go. It's called The Dictator's Guide.
SPEAKER_03: It's nice just to write it. Come on, guys.
SPEAKER_03: Overall, great job. And yeah, get him on the pod here. And we'll have a great discussion with him. Great job, rapist, please invite him to our pod. I think, you know, we each have our own issues.
SPEAKER_02: We'd love to else we're just gonna go with the other Republican candidates, Nikki Haley.
SPEAKER_03: I'm proud of you are also voting for Yes, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, all right. Well, thanks, guys. Yeah, I think it'd be great to get Nikki Haley. No, that's a no, that's a no. Just say no, no.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no. I'm gonna put in the ass to DeSantis for sure. All
SPEAKER_01: right. Well, that's great. Yeah, it would be great. People want
SPEAKER_03: to hear from more folks. So a lot of other news going on. I think a good place for us to go to next. Maybe do we want to do the debt ceiling defense spending or Nvidia? Let's go
SPEAKER_02: let's go together. In my opinion. Okay, great. We'll go
SPEAKER_03: with the Sultan of Science. US debt ceiling is at 31.4 trillion currently, Treasury Department recently won the federal government could be unable to pay its bills as soon as June 1, Fitch put the US credit rating, which is the highest rank of triple A on negative watch. So negative watch means it's trending towards bad and that it's imminent that they might lower it due to this debt limit deadline. It seems like we're not making much progress every couple of days, we seem to swing one way or the other the stock market has kind of shrugged it off. And the last time the US credit was downgraded was in 2011. But we avoided that. Shemagh, what's going on here? What do you think the eventual outcome and is there a chance that these knuckleheads who represent us are going to default and cause chaos? Or do you think this is all kabuki theater and we're going to wind up in the same place which is they raise it and make some modest concessions? August 5 2011. The SMP downgraded the United States from
SPEAKER_04: triple A to double A plus, you know what happened? Absolutely fucking nothing. Okay. So I do think that this is another
SPEAKER_04: opportunity for the little red riding hoods to get their panties in a bunch. But these downgrades don't mean much. They're free. I think that these third party credit rating
SPEAKER_04: agencies are not particularly that accurate and sophisticated. They don't know anything that you don't know. They're not getting access to Moody's gave SVP and a rating the week before
SPEAKER_01: it went into receivership. This is my exact point. None of these
SPEAKER_04: companies know what they're doing. These companies are in the business of putting a letter on a document and then selling access to that document. So if you're going to trust these guys to know what they're saying, either right or wrong, independent of what side you are outsourcing your decision making to the wrong body. So whether it's SMP, Fitch or Moody's, I would tell you to ignore it and come to your own conclusion. I think that this budget ceiling thing is happening now every couple of years. And it seems like the real thing we should be talking about is whether Biden's going to use the 14th amendment and just ran a budget through. And I think that's so under under the 14th amendment, the President of the United States has in their discretion, the ability to make sure that the United States can pay their debts. And that wasn't
SPEAKER_04: necessarily thought of as a way to work around the debt ceiling impasse. But because Congress refuses to pass any structural laws that allow the budget to ebb and flow with tax receipts, we get caught in this situation, again, roughly every handful of years. So what Biden could do is he could say the 14th amendment gives me the right, I'm going to pass a budget via executive order. From a game theory perspective, what that does is it forces Republicans to sue Biden, take him to the Supreme Court and say this is unconstitutional. The problem with that is that that probably really does tank the economy in the way that it creates enough uncertainty where capital markets freeze up and liquidity just absolutely goes away. And again, liquidity has been shrinking for the last 18 months anyways, so it get even worse. So I think the brinksmanship right now between McCarthy and Biden is basically that veiled threat. If Biden effectively isn't going to get something done, I think he's going to test the 14th amendment. Now, if the 14th amendment turns out to be a reasonable way in order to pass a budget, the good news is not just for Biden, but for any future president and including Republican presidents will not have to be held hostage by Congress. They will in the 11th hour be able to pass a budget that works. The implications of that, though, is that now you will not get consensus. And whatever's happening in that moment, you'll see more of so if you have a spending president, they'll just continue to spend and if you have an austerity president, they'll continue to cut. And that'll have implications on either side.
SPEAKER_03: Sax, you think this is over issues a 14th amendment? Or do you think it's a valid use of it? No, it's not gonna fly. I
SPEAKER_01: mean, it's true that the 14th amendment has some language about the full faith and credit the US shall not be compromised. However, it's never been tested or tried. So no one exactly knows what it means. progressives are now saying that the language means that Biden could just keep spending without the debt limit being raised, but find himself through cold water on this. He said that he didn't think he had that authority. And even Lawrence O'Donnell the other night, who's a big progressive on the media, he was saying that the Dems were going to take this tack, they needed to do it months ago before they started negotiating on a debt limit increase. So it's too late now. In other words, if you're going to take that position, why would you have negotiated that you're you the president are effectively conceding, you don't have that authority when you start negotiating. So I think it's too late to invoke the 14th amendment, they're gonna have to raise the debt ceiling. That being said, I think they're going to be able to Reuters had a report this morning that they're only 70 72 billion apart now in their positions, which is a relatively small amount. So my guess is they're gonna they're gonna work this out. Now, what should the fate of the debt limit be moving forward? I mean, the thing that's so stupid about our budget process is we spend the money and then argue about whether we're going to pay the credit card bill. The way that the debt limit should work is you raise the debt before you spend it. Congress should have to vote first on whether they want to deficit or debt spend, then you decide how much you're going to spend. So this thing, this vote needs to be moved up before they spend it. And I think if you did that, it'd be a lot harder for the politicians to spend money because, you know, if you had an up or down vote very early on saying, should we even be in deficit? I think a lot of people would say, No, we're not. We're not in a war. So why? Why would you deficit spend if we bring any
SPEAKER_03: thoughts in the debt ceiling? If not, we'll go on to the government accountability visa via the defense spending. I mean, look, we're running a $2 trillion a year deficit, and
SPEAKER_02: it's forecast to continue to be at that level for several years. And it's going to take pretty radical changes in how we tax and spend to make up that gap. So you know, this is a problem that is going to continue and repeat. And it does beg the question, you know, would you want to buy bonds from an entity that's generating 4 trillion in revenue and spending 6 trillion and has a plan to do that for the foreseeable future. And it's only, you know, seeing its economy or its underlying revenue base grow by 2% a year. It seems like, you know, that would be a very hard startup to fund. And it would be a very difficult growth investment to make, particularly in an environment like this. So I'm just pointing out that this is a becoming a more kind of systemically risky situation for the US that, you know, we spend the way we do. And we have to keep coming back to having these debates about is this appropriate or not. And now they've narrowed down the way that the Republicans seem to be kind of going about getting this done, this deal done is they're only focusing on the, you know, roughly 15% of the overall federal budget. And they're saying, we'll kind of make some tweaks in that in that little range there and save some save some pennies, save some nickels. But we've got a much more fundamental problem to deal with, which is, how do we stop running these deficits and running the data? But I mean, I sound like I'm gonna sound like a friggin No, I think you're right. Yeah, the inflation is
SPEAKER_01: here. And the crowding out of private investment and private borrowing is now occurring because the government borrowing is so big. I mean, our our Treasury, our government debt of what three, 2 trillion, that has to be financed somehow. And all that money is going to finance government instead of being put to other uses. So I think that the downsides already here, you can't run $2 trillion deficits every year. That's unsustainable. Now, I think that you guys referenced what happened in 2011. That's worth this discussing for a second, because I actually think that what was agreed to in 2011 was excellent. Obama and the Republicans in Congress agreed to a thing called the sequester, where they agreed that they would freeze both defense and non defense discretionary spending, until they could get their act together and agree on what the budget should look like. And so the theory was, the Republicans agreed to the pain of freezing defense, Democrats agreed to the pain of freezing non entitlement social spending. And that's how the deal was cut. I actually think that made a lot of sense. And I think we should have kept operating under the sequester until we got to a balanced budget. But the reason that broke, quite frankly, is because the lobbying power of the military industrial complex is so great in both the Republican and Democratic parties, that they basically wanted the sequester over not just raising the defense budget, I think it's just that there's never been a
SPEAKER_02: degree of accountability for the spending that's being done because of this assumption that we'll always be able to pay our debt, and we'll always be able to take on more debt. And I think that you see, the other conversation, the other topic that we were going to talk about, was this lack of accountability and defense spending that, you know, we should play the Jon Stewart clip. You know, where I think who is he interviewed the Undersecretary of Defense or something? What is her title? Deputy Secretary of Defense,
SPEAKER_03: Kathleen Hicks was discussing defense budget. When I see a State Department get a certain amount of money
SPEAKER_00: and a military budget be 10 times that, and I see a struggle within government to get people like more basic services. I mean, we got out of 20 years of war and the Pentagon got a $50 billion raise. Like, that's shocking to me. Now, I may not understand exactly the ins and outs and and the incredible magic of an audit. But I'm a human being who lives on the earth and can't figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. Like to me, that's fucking corruption. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_03: And then there was a story that came out this week, according to Bloomberg, the Government Accountability Office disclosed that the Pentagon is currently unable to account for hundreds of thousands of spare parts for the f 35 jets, the Pentagon
SPEAKER_01: never passed, never passed an audit, and it's accepted. And
SPEAKER_02: it's acceptable in the same way that it's acceptable to never balance the budget, to always spend and give everyone what they want. And to find ourselves in, you know, this kind of late stage problem where we've gotten away with it for so long that both of those factors, whether it's the downgrade on the rating, whether it's the fact that we end up in these battles over whether to raise the debt ceiling every couple of years, or whether we can't pass an audit. All of these factors are symptoms of the same underlying problem, which is that there is no accountability for you know, how we operate the, you know, the kind of fiscal condition of the federal government. You know, the other thing it leads to is all these optional
SPEAKER_01: wars. So let me give you an example. So all of these wars are always they're all free. Yeah, they're all off book. So take Ukraine, we've appropriated what 130 billion, that's not part of the defense budget, we have 800 billion in the defense budget, but then we just stacked 100 billion or so for Ukraine on top of that, and it's off book. Now, if we said the reason we're funding Ukraine is because it improves the national defense, the United States, why wouldn't that just come out of the defense budget? If you force people to make actual choices, actual decisions, and they could say, okay, we could spend 100 billion on Ukraine, or we could spend 100 billion on stockpiling tanks or f 35, or whatever for the United States. Now you can actually force some prioritization decisions. But because the wars are always off book, they're just additive, you just tack them on. And we did that with in Afghanistan, we did that in Iraq, we spent something like $8 trillion. And that was just added to the national debt.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we can't afford these anymore. It's becoming clear to everybody that there has to be some accountability. And Chammath, I guess is seems like there's a couple of unpopular stances to take when you're running for office. One of them is Social Security, retirement age, as we saw in other countries like France, where people are arguing over 62, 64 years old, whatever it is, yeah. And so these entitlements, job requirements, if you want to get unemployment, and then of course, defense spending, you seem un American, if you don't want to take care of old people, you seem un American. And, you know, weak if you don't want to support the government, is there a path towards celebrating an administrator as CEO, an executive who tells honest truth to the American people, which is hey, we've been on a binge, we've been going on vacation, nobody's looking at the bills. And we need to have a staycation. We need to cut costs, we need some austerity here. Is there a path for somebody Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, RFK, whoever it is, to win over the American public to win over moderates with an austerity and a balance the budget message? Or is it just too unpopular to even bring that up? I just think that you guys don't psychologically understand
SPEAKER_04: how to get what you want. I think the best way to get what you want, which I would want to which is a healthy economy where there's accountability for spending, is to not look at expenses. And all of this talk is always about expenses, but to look at revenue, and limit revenue more drastically. And I think the best way to limit revenue dramatically at the federal and state level is to just minimize taxation as much as possible. And I think that is something that Democrats and Republicans have a hard time fighting. Nobody wants to raise their hand and say, I want new taxes. Nobody says that. Right. And I think that if you attach that to some sort of spending guidelines, like what David says with the sensible foreign policy, you just end up spending a lot less. You want to fight a foreign war? Okay, great. Well, you know what, it's part of the existing budget. Let's go figure out why we want to do it. We want to have more accountability and defense spending. Okay, well, look, the defense budget is a half of what it used to be. Because we just have half the revenue. I think that if you start to go and talk about austerity and cutting Social Security and healthcare benefits, it's literally a non starter. People close their eyes, they plug their ears, and you get nowhere. Now, separately, I think the step even before you look at taxation, so minimizing government revenue is to figure out how to refinance. So if you're a homeowner, and you got a mortgage in the 80s, you were paying 12 1415 16%. If when rates kept going down, you were the people around you didn't have the common sense to refinance that that was negligence. Similarly, we're in a position today to refinance our debt wall and push out these maturities past 100 plus years, we are the only country that has a viable, stable economy that looks like it can still continue to thrive at scale. Take advantage of that you lose nothing by giving us the optionality generating some 100 year debt refinancing a bunch of this short term stuff. And then second, inflation helps us. And it helps us because it allows us to inflate the value of these dollars that allows us to pay off our short term maturity. So these are two practical, simple things that are uncontroversial, that should happen today. And then separately, I think you need to look at minimizing revenue. And then you can cut expenses. But if you flip them around, I'm just telling you, I stopped like I want any of this to happen. But I'm telling you, nothing will change. And you guys will still be crying wolf in five years, it'll still be the same, it'll just be a different debt to GDP number that gives you anxiety. Speaking of anxiety, freeback your response, I don't
SPEAKER_02: agree. I think we need to balance the budget. And I think that if we don't, we what don't you agree with financing pushing out 100 years?
SPEAKER_04: No, no, I don't think that reducing revenue solves the
SPEAKER_02: problem. I think that and by the way, one of the problems with a democracy chamath is that you speak about it as if everyone benefits from a tax cut. Generally, there's some disproportionate benefit to a tax cut. And that's why it's less likely to happen, because the majority will benefit by keeping taxes high for a minority, whether that's some corporate minority, or whether it's some wealthy individual minority. And that's why I think the opposite is more likely to happen, which is we're more likely to see taxes go up in order to bridge the gap to continue to fund programs that everyone wants to everyone wants an am they don't want an or and as a result, they'll kind of continue to seek revenue, because there are other places to get revenue that don't affect me, meaning it doesn't affect the majority. And I don't mean me personally, I'm just speaking about a voter and a voter would say, if there's a way to tax other people, for me to get the things I want, they will vote yes for that. And that's ultimately what the system ends up finding. And I think that's what's more likely to end up happening. That's all.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, look, I mean, I agree with part of both of what you're saying, which is, I agree with freeburg that we need to balance the budget, there's no excuse for running peacetime deficits this large, we're really going to regret this one day. On the other hand, I agree with Jamaat that if you just try to solve the problem by raising taxes, the politicians will just keep spending, I mean, you have to starve the beast, I think, in order to control it. At least that's been a view, I think for a long time, you agree with Jamaat on that point,
SPEAKER_02: here's the thing, you cannot solve this problem by raising up
SPEAKER_01: to 70% tax rates like we had in the 1970s. And I can prove it, pull up this chart, France is a good example of this, too. So what you see in this chart here is this is federal overseas, a percentage of GDP. What I see when I eyeball this is if you were to put a regression line on that it'd be around 17%, with a plus or minus of 2%. And the times when you get up to 19%, or a little bit close to 20%, or when we have great economic conditions, or money printing, so the Clinton era from was a 92 to 2000 was an economic boom. And we got up to almost 20%. But we've never ever been able to get more than 20% of GDP and federal tax receipts, even during the 1970s, when the top marginal rate was 70%. What happens? Why is that the people are doing economic activity, it curtails
SPEAKER_04: investment and economic activity. This is documented for hundreds of years. taxation doesn't solve this problem. I don't disagree.
SPEAKER_02: You can only get so much blood from a stone and the reality
SPEAKER_01: reality is, is that when you try to tax rich people in a confiscatory way, they spend a lot more on lawyers and accountants to figure out how to structure their income in a way that, yeah, or they leave,
SPEAKER_03: where they tap out, you know, like, if you're paying 50 60% taxes, like, what's the incentive to go to work? And if you're sitting on a big nut, you can just be like, No, you know, and I'll just I'll just enjoy my life a little bit more, because each incremental dollar 50 60% is going to taxes, and then I have to pay my team and you just sort of interesting returns. I asked a question on Twitter, you know,
SPEAKER_02: because we all talked in our group chat about the concept of passing a balanced budget amendment, which would be an amendment to the US Constitution that says, you know, the Congress has an obligation and the executive branch has an obligation to generate a budget surplus, you know, every every year. And you could have a balanced budget amendment that provides certain exemptions to this, like in a year of war, for example, where Congress declares an emergency or declares a war. And in those cases, theoretically, like if there's some sort of emergency that we have to address and overfund, you can kind of resolve to this. But man, I might.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we've been we've been at war for something like two out of every three years since the Cold War ended. How many of those war sacks were voted on by Congress is the other issue,
SPEAKER_03: you know, well, what happened is we did the authorization for
SPEAKER_01: the use of force, I think goes all the way back to was it like 2001? Whereas basically, we declare a war on terrorism in response to 911. And they use that authorization to go into Afghanistan, which I think was understandable, then they use that same one to go into Iraq, then they use it to go into Syria. And only recently, only a few months ago, do they actually repeal that use of force as a way to keep authorizing new wars. So they really should go back to Congress for every new war. But the problem is, you know, free bird, I agree with you that we need to have a balanced budget amendment, but it's going to contain a caveat or exception for war. And we're just at war all the time now. Sure. But I
SPEAKER_02: think that there's ways to create some mechanism that forces that issue to actually come front and center as opposed to being what you're arguing, which is, hey, it's always on the back burner, therefore, it's always bubbling over. And maybe you draft in that way. But what was surprising to me was just the incredible negative sentiment I got from so many people who are so deeply have this deeply held belief that the only way to support growth in our economy is through federal spending, and that that has become the driver that has become the handicap of our country, it has become the handicap of our economy, it has become the handicap of our people. And as a result, is it a handicap, because it means that we now have this, instead of having an incentive to drive productivity through private commercial and economic activity, through innovation, through productivity gains through business building, it's now dependent on what we have now identified is a highly unaccountable system of spending. And that unaccountable system of spending ends up putting a lot of dollars into the pockets of cronies and the pockets of folks that aren't actually driving job growth or aren't driving productivity. There are certainly programs that work. But overall, there's no level or degree of accountability that asks the question, did that program work? Did we spend $1 and get more than $1 back for what we spent? There's no assessment of that, whether it's a war, or whether it's defense spending, there's always some kind of intellectual argument that is that true. I don't think that's true. I think the OMB releases
SPEAKER_04: report after report saying that all of this stuff sucks and doesn't do anything. Just nobody actually. No one cares. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I don't care. I think what you're saying is inaccurate. This is my point. I think it's important to get the facts right. What you are saying is not true. They do do an accounting that accounting sucks. It shows that there's tons of waste. Nothing changes. So now what do you want to do? David is the real question. What do you want to do knowing that we shouldn't spend on things
SPEAKER_02: that don't have a positive return? This is my point. That's why we're now in this very difficult situation. That's not
SPEAKER_04: happening. Now, what would you like to do? Well, the reason it
SPEAKER_01: doesn't happen is because the way that politics decides things has nothing to do with the merits of it. It has to do with special interests. I agree. I'm just saying, what do
SPEAKER_04: you guys want to do now? Just reality for a second. Our education system is like fundamentally betrayed the
SPEAKER_01: country because we just keep teaching people that somehow the government's gonna solve all these problems when really it's just a product of special interests lobbying for things. And that's why we perpetuate these programs that don't work. I think the best way to think about government spending is
SPEAKER_04: that in every dollar, there's probably 15 or 20 cents that actually does some good. There's probably 15 to 20 cents that's like on the margins, break even. And then the rest of it, which is half of it, is wasted. That's probably roughly accurate, right? You get things like TARP, which turned out to be a pretty decent program. There were things like the DOE loans that got things like Tesla into the marketplace. Right? There's things like the IRA today that'll de-lever ourselves and create a peace dividend because we won't need to fight over resources and oil from other countries. But the problem is that that represents a minority of the dollars. Okay, now that we know that that's true, and we've known that that's true for decades, I guess again, I'm just asking a practical question. What do you guys want to do now? Play the ball where it lies? What do we do today? There's a couple
SPEAKER_02: things you could do. First of all, one of the points I'd make is, I think you're probably right in your assessment that 50 cents, that's what you're calling wasted, that money does end up somewhere. It ends up in someone's pockets, probably the pockets of the shareholders of some contractor, or the donors of individuals or employees, donor class. Well, there's also there's also individuals that benefit, but functionally, what's going on is it's a system of wealth transfer. And that's not necessarily bad. The question is, is the transfer of wealth happening to the right groups that we intend to support with these social programs? Or is it not? And I think Sax's point, which I think we could all probably align on, is it's not. And I think that's probably a set of standards for accountability that we should probably try and create. But
SPEAKER_04: where does that where does that money end up? It ends up buying homes, feeding people, they're going to restaurants, you're buying cars, not like there's like a fleet of mega yachts in America. Well, I guess what I'm asking is where even that leakage of 50% doesn't that just end up in the normal economy? Yeah, it ends up supporting individuals and they buy
SPEAKER_02: trickle down. So why is that so bad? Here is what I'll say. But
SPEAKER_02: that's what I'm saying. It is a wealth transfer. It is a system of wealth where it ends up in people's pockets. And that that system ultimately benefits a lot of people in need and a lot of people that we as a society intend to support here in the US. I don't think it just goes to poor people.
SPEAKER_01: Yes. There's so much corporate welfare. I mean, come on, it's not all just going to needy people. It's going to special interests. On some level, we can accept the inefficiency of
SPEAKER_03: government. I like your idea of constraining how much of a canvas they have to paint with and how much how much revenue they bring in. And I think what we have to accept is that the reason this country gets bailed out is because we have tremendous entrepreneurs, an amazing capital allocation system, a very fluid market for building corporate corporations and capitalism is so vibrant here, that no matter what happens, we always seem to make the next Google, Uber, Nvidia, whatever it is Airbnb. And I can tell you, you know, spending a lot of time traveling, meeting with people in Japan, in UAE, etc. They're all looking at the massive entrepreneurial drive that we have in the United States to build global companies and how we do it over and over and over again. And the only countries that seem to be able to do this at scale, you know, maybe Sweden and some of the Nordics, obviously China, but other countries have not figured out how to build global corporations. And that is what bails us out every time is entrepreneur allocators, the deficit is getting so big that
SPEAKER_01: we can't bail out that way. Think about it, we have 2 trillion in deficit every year. That is two Googles. Yeah, it's
SPEAKER_03: an apple. We're spending an apple every year, we have to we have to address it. But the point is, that's how we have bailed ourselves out. Historically, is massive capital allocation and entrepreneurship. I want to
SPEAKER_04: remind you guys what happened at the end of the 70s. We had all these inflationary problems. We had all of these taxation problems where people thought all of a sudden 70% tax rates were going to solve the problem, what you guys talked about. And instead, the exact opposite thing happened, which was the guy that got elected, Ronald Reagan, and I just want to remind you what the Electoral College was between him and Jimmy Carter, 489 to 49. Like a bigger, just shellacking, I don't think we've seen in modern US politics to the guy that basically said enough with this, we're going to tone it all down, and we're going to cut revenues. So I do think that people have an appetite for them. And I think that, you know, the debt to GDP in 1980 was only 30%. So we just have a
SPEAKER_01: lot less drive to work to do. We got a lot of work to do. But
SPEAKER_01: let me say this. Look, I actually agree with what you're saying in this sense. Okay, if you look at my simple chart of federal tax receipts as percent of GDP, okay, the highest it's ever been in the history of the United States is 19.75%. In 2000, we had the dot com bubble. Okay, that's the highest it's ever been. And we had periods of high tax rates and low tax rates, it never went above 20%. So the simple math here is, you do a forecast of what do you think GDP is gonna be over the next year, you get independent economists to do it. And you say, the federal government can spend more than 20% of GDP, because we've never extracted that we've never figured out a way to extract. It's perfect. Your logic is perfect out of
SPEAKER_03: the economy. The logic is perfect. Your aggression is so
SPEAKER_04: it's very important because what your aggression says is, we're actually spending a lot of energy fighting over two to 300 basis points at any given time, right? Yeah. And what we
SPEAKER_03: should be focusing on is more important. Why are we doing that? Why are we spending so much time getting our panties
SPEAKER_04: in a bunch over two to 300 basis points, and we need to stop
SPEAKER_03: wars, increase our education system, stop the wars, by the way, and inspire people to start companies and make it easy to start companies, the BL the IRA and the chips act, all
SPEAKER_04: three the biggest components in all three bills. This is Biden signature legislation is creating energy independence for America, which will have an enormous peace dividend, you will not fight these stupid, endless wars. Every single one
SPEAKER_03: of them goes back to oil, right? Like, with the exception of it's always about resources. Yeah, what has never been about
SPEAKER_04: resources in modern history? Well, and now it's going to be
SPEAKER_03: chips is the modern resource in video shares jumped as much as 30% after reporting huge revenue guidance due to AI demand, q1 revenue 7.2 bill up 19% quarter over quarter, not year over year quarter of a quarter. Revenue beat analyst estimates by more than 600 million for people don't know, Nvidia is working on GPUs as opposed to CPUs, the graphic processing units that are being leveraged in AI. And there is a massive cycle going on. There's a line out the door to buy these when you see Twitter going into AI, Facebook, Google, and obviously Microsoft, all the cloud infrastructure is moving from CPU to GPU. Yes, freeburg. Well, I mean, I was talking with the
SPEAKER_02: CEO and CFO of a major data center read, and they shared with me that they're seeing more demand in the last couple of months than they've seen in the prior 10 years. Almost all of that data center build out demand, so they'll build data centers for software companies, for internet companies, is coming from GPU racks. And these GPU racks are much more energy intensive, much more costly. But it's a pretty kind of significant shift underway that businesses that historically didn't even operate their own data centers are now building out their own data centers to have their own training systems to have their own infrastructure to be able to run AI applications and tools. So it's a pretty significant shift underway. All of the growth that Nvidia is projecting and highlighted in this earnings report yesterday is coming from their data center line of products. And it's a pretty significant, I mean, I don't know, people have said they've never seen a beat like this or never seen a guidance update like this of the scale where I think the street was looking for maybe a $7 billion guide on revenue for this and they basically came out and said they're going to guide to 11 billion next quarter, which is just an insane bump for a 90 day outlook. I was told from one of their major customers that they had to
SPEAKER_03: beg, like, he's in bag for 1000s of GPUs. And like the lobbying effort, he said, there's a line around the corner to buy these and you need only use chat GPT or any stable diffusion, etc. And you see how long it takes to do by generative AI to use these products. It's like we're back to dial up modem sacks. We're literally we're waiting for a computer to give us an answer. When's the last time that happened that we had to sit there and wait for it to do its job. And I think this is the great renewal for America and other amazing American companies only three decades old. It's best years, it's best decades are in front of it. Obviously, this is going to be a massive boon for not only Nvidia before America, or as I say, America.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Nvidia has basically joined the trillion dollar club now in terms of market cap companies. It's really amazing. I mean, I'm kind of kicking myself because this was the easiest buy ever chat GPT launch on November 30. We all saw that that immediately ushered in a whole new era in Silicon Valley. There's a ton of VC funding that's poured into AI startups, they all need to train models. And those models need to use GPUs. So we all saw this coming. And yeah, I'm kind of annoying with myself. But let me ask you a question. So you say that you kick
SPEAKER_02: yourself, obviously, the general statement that you know, AI is coming and Nvidia is going to be a beneficiary or Nvidia's products are going to see a boon makes sense. But when you look at the valuation of the business, they are currently trading at 70 times the next 12 months EBITDA. So how do you think about valuation even at a trillion dollar market cap at a trillion dollar market cap, they're trading at 70 times next 12 months EBITDA. You know, this seems like they're doubling revenue every six months, though, dude, they're
SPEAKER_03: doubling revenue. How high does it go? Because at a trillion
SPEAKER_02: dollars, what's the right EBITDA level for a business to be worth a trillion dollars? Is it 100? Right? Is it 100? But I mean, what's the number? And then the question is, if it's 100 billion, how many years does it take them to grow into that? And you know, are you really paying the right price? Are you paying a premium to get, you know, it's a momentum stock now and will be determined if they have competition. So is is there
SPEAKER_03: competition for this company? Chamath, you'd think there's a competitor that will emerge that, you know, I mean, it's
SPEAKER_04: important to understand what a GPU is maybe so sure, Intel had the run of the place for the first 40 years of compute. Because it turned out that most of the things that we use it for Excel, Microsoft Word, a browser, operated well, on a CPU, which essentially think about it as like a factory that takes in the first order and then puts it out first in first out. And the great thing about GPUs is that it can take multiple streams of work at the same time and work on them at the same time, right? So it's very parallel and has this level of parallelism. That makes it very well suited for AI applications. I think the thing to keep in mind is that it is a byproduct of a GPU that tries to also do other things. And so as a result of that, you're now seeing a lot of companies building their own silicon. And most importantly, all the big tech companies now have some pretty well evolved efforts underway. So a lot of these companies have figured out how to do custom ASICs that can do this massively parallel processing. And what you're now seeing is chips that are designed against specific models that are optimized for them. The other thing that you're also seeing is that some people are saying, well, you know what, for these massive models, actually, you should just run it all in memory. And so you're having folks that are doing it in in massive arrays of FPGAs. That was Microsoft's first attempt at all of this. So what is the point of me telling you this? I think that, again, we talked about this last week, the biggest cheerleaders of this first point of value creation has really been Wall Street and family offices that wanted to front run where the value creation was going to initially go. And they've been right, which is around chips. But there was a tweet and Nick, I posted it, maybe you can throw it up here that shows that if you compare this to the mobile internet, there's always this phased approach in terms of value creation, where, let's just say, initially in a new market, mobile, a decade ago, and AI today, the first dollar of profits tends to go to the chip companies. That makes a lot of sense, right? Because they're the ones that are in the bowels of making the elemental capabilities possible. And then you transition that value. And what freeburg says is people realize, hey, hold on, the profit dollars are not going to accrue there. Because again, this beautiful principle of capitalism is that you can only over earn for a certain amount of time because then competitors emerge and say, hold on, I want to steal those profit dollars from you and take them for myself. So margins compress, right? So in the end, Nvidia's gains today will be then spread across Nvidia, Facebook will have their own chip, Amazon will have their own chip, Google already does. Apple will have their own chip, all the memory companies will be in this space, right? So then the profits get smeared there, multiples compress. Then where does the value grow to the device companies in the mobile internet? Here, I think we still have to debate what is a device company in the world of AI. But the most important thing I think to remember is that where the real value gets accrued is five, six, seven years later, when the software and services companies show up and create a huge moat. And those are the Googles and the Facebooks and the Apples of the world. And so it's a really dynamic moment. I think it's wonderful for Nvidia. It's an amazing story for Jensen, who's been really at this game for a very long time. By the way, there's a Jensen has a law of his own that is a sort of companion to Moore's law called Wang's law named after himself, which you can read about, which just talks about the variability of the compute capabilities of GPUs versus CPUs. So if you want to know that he should get some credit for that. But I think it's great. I think we're in the And by the way, Apple is also making their own GPUs. That's
SPEAKER_03: what when you hear the M2 that has GPUs in it. So yeah, you're absolutely correct. We're in any one. So we're gonna have a few
SPEAKER_04: quarters for sure of this hype. And then the smart money will probably figure out where the next the lily pad is. And then they'll go to the next beautifully said, beautifully
SPEAKER_03: said. Any other thoughts? free break? If we wrap that up on that, I wanted to show this AI demo from Adobe Photoshop, you know, every week or so we see something that's incredible. And this one was we shared in the group chat. But for those who put this out, yeah, so what we see here, if you're listening is, you know, taking a Photoshop creating an area and then instead of like, cutting and pastes pasting or refining it, you're putting in a text prompt and saying, Oh, put expand the
SPEAKER_03: and make this widescreen or let me grab this deer out of a forest and then put it on a wet alley at night. And then you know, let me highlight this wall over here and put a sign and put a red arrow sign and it just generates it and it's doing this. They made specific note when they launched this that all of this is done with stock photography, they have the complete license to so they can monetize this without getting sued. Like Microsoft is currently being sued and Microsoft actually in addition to the GitHub lawsuit. It turns
SPEAKER_03: out Twitter sent a letter over to Microsoft as well. So incredible demo. The producers here at all in as our production team grows. Producer Brian made a little video here. Here's Chamath in before the Lora piano days. That's that's Tom
SPEAKER_04: Ford. Yeah, that's Tom for this is when bad terrible hair is
SPEAKER_03: terrible. You look tired. The watch looks great. No, I have a good night. My God, I played poker. Literally I walked into
SPEAKER_04: that to that CNBC. Really straight from the poker table to the brutal to the squat. Wait, no tie. But he's wearing a tie.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, Tom Ford. Yeah, he said he said, try this without the without a tie. I said, Okay. Oh, you were talking to Tom Ford. Great. What a flex. You know, Tom Ford is probably twice in my life. I can tell you both stories. Okay, well, hold on a
SPEAKER_03: second. So we're degenerate. I add make a yellow sweater is the prompt here. Let's see if he goes to Bert from Ernie to Bert. There is Sri Lankan Bert, as we call him in the not that good. Doesn't quite get the borders right. It looks like a worries
SPEAKER_03: Jersey. Oh, there you go. Pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. Change my
SPEAKER_03: hair bro changed my writing the demo was both changes hair. Can we can we have the hair be less in sync? Less Hassan Minaj and more given that I understand why they call you Aziz on sorry, I
SPEAKER_01: think the you had the hair gone the hair. Yeah, it's a lot of
SPEAKER_03: lift. And what was that day? But it's funny. What is that? Is it
SPEAKER_04: putty? This is like eight years ago. Is it what are you using
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_04: clay or putty? What do you what do you it's like it's like a stiff. It's like a stiff hair wax. I think it's got it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: I've come such a long way since now. Much more much more stylish. I mean, look at Sax's crazy hair as we probably did in
SPEAKER_03: the cold open. My thought on the Adobe thing for what it's
SPEAKER_04: worth is like, I mean, do they want a mulligan on this $20 billion figma thing or do they get to see the ongoing revenues that figma is generating either on a personal basis or the company to lean upon all kinds of stuff. It's a
SPEAKER_02: different product, though. I mean, the AI stuff certainly has had an impact. But I mean, so much of the benefit of figma is it's web based, it's collaborative. It's like people kind of use it online to make stuff together. It's a little different than the other tools that they offer today. So you
SPEAKER_04: don't think it from September to now, like, nothing changes, they should just close this thing at 20 billion or they're half they're half big. Do you think that they should pay a billion, break it up and then redo the deal at 10 and then it costs? Remember, not all breakup fees mean that you can break up
SPEAKER_02: for any reason. So there's only there's limited outs on what you can pay a breakup fee to get out of it, one of which could be antitrust or regulatory. But otherwise, you may be forced to close in court if you don't have a valid reason for terminating the deal. Their only hope is to get lean a content. muck it up.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, some leaks come off is your argument more that they
SPEAKER_01: bought figma top of market pricing, which no longer makes sense? Or is your argument that they're innovating so well, they don't need it? I think it's a little bit of both. But it's,
SPEAKER_04: it's more that I think this generative AI stuff allows you to refresh. I tweeted this out. So Nick, maybe you can put it up there. But I think the first thing is that your feature set can catch up pretty quickly. So even if you set out a team and said, just copy exactly what figma has with a co pilot, enabling 50 engineers, that's like 500 engineers cranking on something, I would be surprised if they couldn't just replicate the product end to end. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is, I think that you've seen VC funding basically crawl to a halt. And so the question there is how many of those companies are just going to stop spending because they're just not going to exist. And then the third thing is, if we're sort of hashtag austerity, people are going to look at everything they're spending money on and try to be really disciplined about it. If you roll all those things together, sacks, my thought is, maybe the deal still makes sense. But does it make sense at 20 billion? And does it then just create a whole suite of shareholder lawsuits after the fact that are just going to say these three things and regurgitate them ad nauseum? That's the curiosity I had. Well, so we're here, let's talk
SPEAKER_03: a little bit about the state of Silicon Valley, Sachs. We were talking offline after the show last week. You've slowed down investment at your firm craft, you're being thoughtful, you're working on the existing portfolios, how would you describe your activity so far in the first half of 2023 as a firm, if you're so willing to share that my take on what's
SPEAKER_01: happening in Silicon Valley right now, or tech more generally, is it's a tale of two cities is the best of times for AI startups and the worst of times for everybody else. The AI startups, there's a lot of interesting things happening there. And money is being pushed at them by VCs. It's very frothy, arguably bubbly. But then at the same time, if you're a pre AI company, maybe the one that raised a lot of money at a big valuation in 2020, or 2021. It's a pretty tough time. I don't know of any startup, especially like later stage startups who are hitting their numbers. Everyone is reforcasting down, everyone's missing. I think that speaks to the larger economy is not doing that well. I think the economists a year from now may say that the recession had already begun. Certainly feels like that. That's what drugs at
SPEAKER_01: the stone conference. And I think that startups are absolutely seeing that in their sales right now sales are slipping, it's taking longer. Buyers are sharpening their pencils. It's a really tough environment, I think for software startups that are actually trying to make sales. AI starts are a little bit exempt for that because people are still investing based on the dream, not based on the metrics. And I would say that we're very interested in AI and we're starting to make some investments. But we also like to invest based on metrics, not just on a dream. And so we're being somewhat cautious about how we approach it. So you make a small seed bat and somebody who has a dream if I
SPEAKER_03: can translate here, but if you're gonna make a bigger bad series a series B, you're gonna want to see some numbers on the board, you're gonna want to see some product and market, it's a really good way of putting it because I think the standards
SPEAKER_01: change at each round and then at the seed stage, you can absolutely just make a bet based on the dream or just based on a founder. Sure, great founder going after the AI space idea still a little bit to be flushed out, you can make that bet but 500k 750. Or even even like 3 million will do as a big round.
SPEAKER_01: But but then when you get to series A and you want us to write a 10 12 $15 million check, we kind of want to see some revenue. Yeah. And certainly by the time you get to series B or series C, we want to see like all the standard metrics, we want to see net dollar retention, expansion, all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's really hard for the later stage startups because they raised and this is the lesson if you're raising at three, four or 500 million sacks, correct me if I'm wrong here. You're not you have to build into that valuation. And let's face it, that valuation A was never realistic, it was overpriced. And then B, you got the headwinds and your customers are saying, Oh, you want 40,000 a year for this SaaS product will give you 12. And what position are you into turn down the 12 you got to take the 12 because you got three competitors who are going to roll up and take the 12. So it's
SPEAKER_01: hard. So can I give you an update? Please remember I mentioned there was a startup in my portfolio, actually my my angel portfolio. Yes. That play around the cram down. And I think it's absolutely tragic because of what I learned, which is the founders got crammed down to because a year ago, they brought in a professional CEO. And I think as a result of this, they're probably going to get nothing for 10 years of work. Whereas if they had just cut costs, dammit, and you know, the company has 32 million of ARR. So imagine if they cut their objects to a million a month, they could have run $20 million of EBITDA pivot to the private equity model, sell that company for 150 million, half would have gone to pay off the investors and the other half would have gone a lot of would have gone to the comment probably would have made $10 million each. And now they get zero because they burnt too much money, didn't want to cut costs. They bought into the dream of bringing the professional CEO is going to re accelerate growth, never done out. Never does. And so it's like so frustrating to me because I like feel so bad for these founders. I wish they called me a year ago. And I would have been one of the guys counting on the table just cut costs and then control your desk because Listen, yes. And here's the thing is, if you're only growing 1015 20% or even 50% a year, you're not a VC backable startup, you are a private equity play. So you got to pivot to that model of making your business work as a cash flow positive business. Yeah, that's how you're gonna get an exit. And you know, if you're growing 100% plus year, you can continue to be VC back. So it's so important for founders to understand whether they're even eligible for venture capital anymore. And if they're not, you have to make a different kind of model work. If you want to see a return. Yeah. And when this happens, a cram down round. Those founders
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_03: if they want a refresh, they have to prove their worth. They're not just going to get a refresh to keep the relationship going. This is $30 million in revenue. They don't need the founders anymore.
SPEAKER_01: Look, these guys been working for 10 years. So even if they got a refresh, they put in four more years of work. And the other thing is this cram down round, I think was way too big. They raised 25 million with a 3x lick pref. 75 million off the top off the top. They will get back big is
SPEAKER_03: triple. Yep. Oh my god, who this is where board governance is so
SPEAKER_03: important. Shemagh, huh? Like, I mean, who is on the board of these companies? We thought I was not I was on the board.
SPEAKER_01: Idiots are on the boards of these companies. These are
SPEAKER_04: unbelievable. They've never had to build a company. And they may
SPEAKER_04: be educated, or they may have been an executive company. And then some VC who was feverishly raising funds just hired some dope, put them on the board of this company. And then just the stupidity compounds and trickles down. It's so frustrating
SPEAKER_01: compounding stupidity. This is the beginning of the beginning.
SPEAKER_04: All of these people who have zero judgment are going to fuck so many companies up. It is the beginning of the beginning.
SPEAKER_01: And what's your mouth? It's not just the bad board members. It's the view for so many years that who you put on your board didn't matter. Remember, there was all these VCs who had a model where it's like, well, we don't take a board seat, and they were selling that to founders as a positive. As a feature,
SPEAKER_01: as a feature, not a bug. And the reality is for a lot of VCs, actually not being on the board probably is the best they can offer. But you know, that model works. That model works when everything is up into the right where like this model of board seats don't matter. Governance doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_01: That is a model in a boom, where everything just keeps going up into the right. But when you had a tough time, that is when you need a board member who's seen this movie before, who knows what a cram down round is, who knows what's going to happen to you a year hence, when you get screwed into taking a three x, where you want the gray hair pilot, you know, in the right
SPEAKER_03: seat to say, Hey, listen, we're going to share you want that hair, you want that sex here. All right, free bird, you are always candid about your own journey. You've had huge wins climate.com from Billy, raising funds, but you know, sometimes things don't work out. What do you what's your take on some of these hard lessons of great ideas, you know, spun up during this really hard market?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think, just to echo the point you guys are making in the last 15 years, we've been in a college structurally inflated environment because of the zero interest rate policy since the oh eight financial crisis. And everything's been up into the writer so much. It's been so easy to kind of inflate things, fill up hot air balloons and go up into the right. And unfortunately, most folks who are working in the investor community that are sitting on boards weren't around for the dot com crash the last time this happened. And I think, you know, just to kind of echo your point why it's so challenging, I think right now to figure out a way out. There are, there's a lot of failure going on in in Silicon Valley right now, you know, Saks, you talk a little bit about having paths for exit and options for SaaS companies, but there are many sectors and startup land that don't have those sorts of options in biotech, in sin bio, in FinTech, and direct to consumer ecommerce. There's a lot of markets that a lot of types of businesses that feel like there isn't a great way out. And it's having a deep psychological toll on entrepreneurs, on founders, on CEOs, and everyone is experiencing some degree of failure in this environment. There are very few folks who aren't feeling this acute pressure and this acute pain. You know, I heard some pretty horrific stories this week from a friend of mine and someone who ended up in the hospital because of the pressure he was under. And it's really trying and you know, even within our friend group, I mean, not not our direct friend group within our broader community of investor friends, there are very few people who aren't feeling this extraordinary pressure that they've got a book that is declining in value, and they don't know how to get out of the hole. And you know, that pressure is like, is generates deep questions about one's ability and generates deep existential thought for entrepreneurs and investors about what the hell am I good at? And no one's really talking about this out loud. But it is a happening across the valley. We all have these thoughts. We all have these dialogues, as the failure begins to set in, in the slow motion train wreck of a market that we've all been talking about for weeks and months. How do you deal with it? Look, I mean, I just think that number one, it's worth acknowledging and it's worth having the conversation that no one is alone going through this pain. It is not a one off that these companies are failing. It is that we are all dealing with failure right now. And we are all trying to figure out what is the best path forward. And it is the kind of thing that you just have to work your way through and you have to persist through this pain. But this existential question of Am I good enough? Do I have the skill set I thought I had? Am I just an idiot? Did I blow it up? Emperor has no clothes, all the kind of inner fear and turmoil that everyone's dealing with. You're not alone going through it. A lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of investors are in the exact same place. Now, with respect to going forward, I think having integrity with respect to how you handle these situations and having thoughtfulness about, you know, your reputation, because this is not a one and done environment here in Silicon Valley. Failure is part of the process. And how you deal your deal, deal with people deal with investors deal with entrepreneurs deal with each other deal with your employees, during these difficult times says a lot about your character and your ability that when you do this the next time, it will set you up for success. And you know, as any great athlete will tell you, you build muscle during the times that you're failing, and then you're ready to go and execute the next time around. So you know, let's save it for the next quarter. But let's play well as best we can right now, through this quarter,
SPEAKER_03: chamath, clearly, you want to jump in here? What are your thoughts on separating your identity from your startup from your work and having a more balanced view of yourself so that when things go wrong, maybe you're not as devastated, you don't wind up in a hospital bed when things go wrong. They go
SPEAKER_04: wrong in bunches. Just like when things go right, they tend to go right in bunches. I called freebird last week, and I was telling him a story about two or three of my businesses just all just pounding eating dirt. And what I said to him was, and then we have a mutual investment that's doing pretty well. And I needed to use the one that was doing well to make myself feel better about the three that were eating dirt. And I said to him something to the effect of it's just like nothing is working. I feel like literally nothing is working and a place to be the only thing that you can do in those moments is just realize it would be so much worse to just be on the sidelines. Oh, I like it. And I think that's all you can do. Then you go and hang out with your friends. Go hang out with your family. Kiss your
SPEAKER_04: wife. Have as good of a time as possible outside the context of work and then you just start the grind again. But yeah, we are in a moment where in most companies, there is something pretty wrong. It's either your burn, product, your track customers team, cap structure and riff cap
SPEAKER_03: table. Yeah. And by the way, that's always the problem. But it tends to be
SPEAKER_04: balanced by a few things in your portfolio that are always going well. So that as an investor, you can maintain some equanimity through the whole process. But freeburg is right when there aren't enough of these positives, and there's just a parade of terribles. You're just like, wow, this whole portfolio. Is it all about to fail? And then I get a massive wave of imposter syndrome of like, what am I doing here, and then I have to recognize, holy shit, this is my 24th year. Take a deep breath. And it's great that it's that exhilarating where I think it's back to 2000. I just emigrated here. That's the conversation to Martha and I had beautiful talking
SPEAKER_02: about like a string of difficult things we're all dealing with, you know, a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we returned all the money to all our all our customers at Kanna, which was this molecular beverage printer company I've been working on for a few years. I plowed north of $30 million of our capital into building this business. We had two term sheets last year, both of which vaporized as the markets that degraded, it was really a brutal experience for me. And these were very high valuations. And we were, we needed funding to get the production line stood up to manufacture that device. So we were that close. And as the market went south, pre revenue hardware companies became less fundable. And despite our reputation and a great working product and a product and a manufacturing ready prototype, we couldn't get it done. It was a really kind of brutal experience to go through the nose, even after you've had a lot of success in your life, believe it or not, you still get a lot of friggin nose, and you get a lot of I don't believe us. And then to just have to get to a point with this one was really difficult. And there's been other kind of frustrating experiences of late. And then, you know, you kind of have a call one day with another investment. And you're like, Oh, my God, this thing could be a home run. And that just comes out of nowhere. And, you know, as long as we kind of stay in it, as an investor, and you
SPEAKER_02: keep, you know, as a builder, and you kind of keep building, you don't know when that good knock on the door is going to come. Yep, you got to stay in the game, you're building a
SPEAKER_03: business. And one day, you just nail a sale that you just
SPEAKER_02: weren't expecting or a partnership, or an M&A inbound or something that happens that you weren't expecting, it pays for all the pain, and all the loss and all the turmoil and all the downside. I always used to tell people, for every, you know, four days, I'd be failing, I'd have one day of success, but that one day of success will get me slightly ahead of where I was at the start of the week. But 80% of it was failing. I mean, right now, it's like 19 days of failure and one day of success. But that one day of success, the goal is used to have a couple of those punctuated moments that are big enough that make up for all this stuff. If you just keep grinding. And if you just keep grinding as an entrepreneur, you keep grinding as an investor and stay in the game, living with the power. You're describing living with the power
SPEAKER_04: law. Yeah, there's a very relatable poker analogy, analogy in this, there's a there's a guy that makes poker content. His name is Jonathan Little, he's great. He'll be up to Angel Summit. He's wonderful. I've been thinking about hopping into one tournament at the WSOP this year. It's one of the big buying tournaments. So I'm like, let me just take a little tournament refresher. And I was just looking for any content. And I found his and he had this beautiful slide, which he said, if you are a mid level poker player, you should expect to have a final table. Every one in 100 tournaments, roughly. And I thought about that for a second. And I was like, that's a 1% success rate. Now, if that is your 99th tournament, you have to be pretty resilient to go through 98 losses where you don't cash, you don't make the money. And you're just putting money out, you're deep in a J curve. And you're like, is this ever going to work out for me. And so it's a really, really good reminder that it is the grind. Yeah. And I thought that
SPEAKER_04: was really interesting.
SPEAKER_03: You had a single or double, I guess, with call in, maybe you talk a little bit about that experience and what decision you made there. We were obviously investors. So we're a bit conflicted. But I'd love to hear your candid thoughts on why you decided to sell.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we put together a great team and they built an amazing product. I think it's by far the best sort of social audio product. And actually, they added video to it as well and they added audio podcasting features. So it's kind of the synthesis of video and audio podcasting with social audio, we got acquired by rumble, it's sort of like a base hit type acquisition. It's, it's a small deal, relatively speaking, but the team wanted to do it. And then the main reason is because we got to hundreds of 1000s of users. But in the consumer space, you really need to get to millions. And frankly, 10s of millions is what it takes to have a successful consumer experience. And it does have 10s of millions of users. So the team wanted to find a home and there's a lot of synergy with rumble. Both companies have a mission that's aligned around free speech, rumble sort of the call it free speech alternative to YouTube. So video platform. And what Colin will do is give rumble studio capabilities. So it'll be very synergistic for all their creators to be able to create content in call and then rumble. So it's not, you know, a huge outcome for anyone sort of push for the investors, depending on what rumble stock ends up. But look, it's just you can build a really great product and a great team. But unless you hit that lighting a bottle with distribution, you know, you won't get to the next level. So I'm happy about the deal. I think the team's happy about the deal. And it's a good outcome for for everybody involved. But it's not, you know, it's not a home run. It's just, it's more of a base hit. And that's what most of these things are. Yeah, getting used to a high failure rate and living inside
SPEAKER_03: the power law where one investment out of 30 or 40 or 50 results in 90% of your funds returns for you know, that specific fund or so or maybe two wins represent 95%. That's a hard thing for the human brain to handle as is the J curve as Chamath, you know, points out correctly, man, you invest for two or three years, and then you watch the all those things go down in value for two or three years or the value I'm sorry of the portfolio go down for three years before it actually rebounds and goes back up. I remember, man, I had a run where everything I touched turned to gold. And then mahalo hit 10 million in revenue, and then boom, panda update. And it just goes up and smoke and you're like, what what just happened? I saw web logs 18 months after starting it, I you know, had the silicon I report, I just Uber investment, everything I touched, went to the moon working. Yeah, yeah. And then it's just a very frustrating experience where you can't make something work. And you know, like, I should be able to make this work. Why isn't it working? There's a very heavy blanket of
SPEAKER_02: humility setting over Silicon Valley right now. And I think all of us who have had strings of successes and repeat successes and you know, things that we touch have worked. And we do all the same things. And we do the right things. And we do them the same way in the right way. And it doesn't work. And then it doesn't work again. And it doesn't work again. It creates a very different psyche, whether you're an entrepreneur building a business or an investor investing in businesses, that what used to be the case isn't the case anymore as the tides have shifted. It's, it's a daunting challenge to work your way psychologically through this moment. But you know, progress doesn't change, innovation isn't going to stop technology isn't going to keep shifting forward. And the opportunities to continue to build and innovate are not going away. So I for one am deeply optimistic and excited about what the future holds. But man, you got to put your friggin game face on right now to get through this. Yeah, for sure. Well,
SPEAKER_01: yeah. And I would say there's one other exogenous variable here, which is I don't think any of us realized how much our sentiment was affected by one guy's decision at the Fed. Yeah, like what interest rates are gonna be visible hands. Yeah, because you know what, when there's a lot of money in the system, everyone feels great. And all the portfolios look great. And when the money is being sucked out of the buyers are buying and Oh my god, like when the money is being sucked out of the system, everyone's results look terrible. Yep, it's
SPEAKER_03: you know, it's like before a tsunami, a big wave gets pulled out and then this tsunami comes in. Yeah. It's literally we're getting sold out. The money is being sucked out of the system,
SPEAKER_01: like the tide before a tsunami and tsunami is gonna be all the failures and bankruptcies. But what I would say is just in the same way that things weren't as good as they appear to be during the asset bubble. They're probably not as bad as they appear to be now. However, you have to give yourself time to get through this recessionary cycle. And it's so frustrating to me when founders don't want to cut their burn. The burn is the one thing they totally control. And they have all these excuses for why they can't cut to an earlier level spending that they were the company was working fine at. And we can't get them to go back to cut back to some earlier state of being soccer. If soccer bird can do it, they can do it.
SPEAKER_01: And you know, after seeing what Elon did at Twitter, where he reduced the staff by 80%, I'm like, I realize there's no good excuse anymore. Yep, for not giving yourself the maximum chance of survival. And if you overcut, like he admits he probably did he
SPEAKER_03: literally in the day Farber great interview he did with him. He said, you know, like, we probably overcut. We cut people who were great. And we hopefully can welcome them back to Twitter as we get this thing on stable footing. But we're going to make mistakes because we had an existential crisis. Elon Musk cut too many people admits it and says he's going to bring them back. It's no fault of theirs. And he said he's going back into growth mode. So you know, like sometimes you cut, you might cut too deep is the point. And you know, that set you up for growth in the future. Chumath you had something you wanted to add. I have two shout outs. Okay, here we go. The first is to one
SPEAKER_04: of our besties got a text from Jason Kuhn. He binked the main event at the Triton for two and a half million. Yeah. I mean, he's so strong. He's a guy's a beast. So it's so great to have
SPEAKER_03: a professional poker player in our circle. Finally, like somebody who's consistently over time, we can learn from but he's so open and he teaches around him, you know, rationally stable, rational, humble, humble professional poker player like happens to basically be the best poker
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_04: player in the world. But you could you would never know it. You never know. He'd never bring it up. Like he is literally the greatest and he won the Triton 2.5 Millie. Yeah, the second the
SPEAKER_04: second shout out is here we go to the Model Y team at Tesla. I have been a diehard Model X user from the beginning. Right? I think I had here we go number 13. So I've been I've been I've had three or four of these things. And I was like, wait a minute, maybe this why is really all it's cracked up to be and I'm a bit of a curmudgeon and I have high expectations, but I just want to say that car kicks absolute ass. It is perfect. In credit. No, it is incredible that model Y is going to be the best selling car. Yeah, it's going to be the best selling car in America. If you get the base level, it's actually cheaper than the average car in America now with incentives. It's so so good. So huge 300 miles range which is huge, huge
SPEAKER_04: shout out to the Model Y team at Tesla. You guys nailed it. Yeah, it's my daily product and we I love it. I don't want to
SPEAKER_03: diminish the X. I don't know. But the Y is why is so snappy. It was the best car ever made. It is the best. Yeah, it's a great car. It's a great great
SPEAKER_03: car. A great way for a Cybertruck that thing looks like a beast. I can't wait to take that up on roadster. I want the
SPEAKER_04: roadster. You know, I've been taking my 12 year old roadster
SPEAKER_03: out and my kids love going for ice cream in the the original roadster 1.07 taking it out every weekend or two. Number one, number 16 of the roadster, which somebody offered me a quarter million dollars for I paid 160 for it. I have number one of the model s signature series. So I have signature 16 of roadster they did 100 signatures and they did 1000 signatures of the model s. And I have number one of that and somebody offered me a million dollars for that I have number
SPEAKER_04: of the founders edition number 13 of the X. Yeah, that's
SPEAKER_03: pretty special. Yeah, I'd hold on to that. Yeah, there it's a special vehicle. All right, listen, everybody. All in summit is basically so doing how's the all in summit doing guys? We're
SPEAKER_02: starting to do our outreach and to speak. Yes, yeah, so it's exciting. All right, everybody for the Sultan of Science, the
SPEAKER_03: dictator and Steve Bannon 2.0 David Sachs, the architect, the
SPEAKER_04: architect, the architect, I like that I remain even after
SPEAKER_03: Saxe's triumphant spaces, I remain the world's greatest moderator. So excited for this weekend, boys. See you tomorrow
SPEAKER_04: at the tarmac on the tarmac. Bye bye. Love you. Bye.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release.
